seven to perfidy
by ethnonyms
Summary: His life is one long tired string of backstabbings, give-and-take, all with that same razor smile. In the shadow half he's Judas walking but of course it's all in good fun. —kyd wykkyd. tw child abuse torture
1. one

Retrace the steps and it always starts the same with those types:

**_That boy is not like the others._**

* * *

This one is pale. His face is sharp and his skin grey without color, and he cries when his mother carries him out into the sunlight.

He is four. Left to his own devices, he shrinks back to the shadows and sticks his thumb into his mouth and hides from the people he sees beneath the folds of his black cloak. Out of sight from the world, he makes silly games and friends armed with only his imagination. He is shy and small, and smart. But not yet.

The boy's hair is dark and thin, smooth, fine. His eyes are cherry-red, sclera to iris to pupil.

He is not human, not completely—which, in the grander scheme of things, is as good as not at all. Not enough.

_Albino_, his frail mother whispers nervously to her sisters and the older children, clutching at the patched fabric of her dress.

No one believes the lie.

* * *

The boy has no father. If he ever did, that man (whatever it was) is long gone now, vanished to the unknown from whence he came. The boy carries around a sleek black cloak made of shadows and treachery and disappearing, possibly some long-forgotten token, or an heirloom, from the progenitor he never knew. If nothing else, it's something he can wear. Something to make him different.

Nobody really knows what to make of it. However, when his siblings try to tug the cape away from him, the boy wails and clings until they give up. It's his. It's him. It is.

Perhaps some prescient impulse in him senses the cloak's importance years too soon; understands that it will be all he ever has, to remember the faceless first traitor among so many that will define his life. Not likely, however. Whatever the boy is, he is still a child. There is very little that he knows and even less he is able to understand.

He is too young now, to give as good as he gets. That won't always be the case.

Time makes wicked of us all.


	2. two

There are six of them in their family. The boy is the youngest, and the strangest. The former is enough that he would already bear the brunt of their resentment. The latter breeds hate, a venom more dangerous than water and blood.

In the life they all live, there is not, is never _enough_: food, clothes, money, compassion. There was not enough before the boy was born. There is certainly none to spare now.

The children's mother loves them. But, she loves her prayer books and her sisters and her memories and her pastors too. Love spreads thin over so many years, so many recipients, and being a human she also needs room for her despair. Dangerously, she cannot be relied upon. The rest of her people are worse, if they can be described as anything. The sisters teach the children that they are to blame for all of what goes wrong. The brothers and the preachers teach that to ask for help is an unforgivable sin. The children learn to fend for themselves, and not for each other.

The home they live in is an apartment too filthy for rats. The eldest siblings go to school, if only for meals. The others spend their days scrounging up what they can find in the city. They are all very, very good at running.

It is not a good life that they have. The boy knows this, vaguely.

It could be much worse.

* * *

The boy shies away from the streets. He prefers to hide during the day, or play games at home. Sometimes his siblings drag him out to the middle of the busiest part of town, and try to abandon him amid the throngs of strangers. The boy always finds his way back, the way his smaller cousins didn't, drawing into his cloak and navigating the spaces between shadows if he needs to plot his way. The others despise him for his persistence. The boy knows it. He doesn't understand enough to care.

His mother screams and pleads with him when he vanishes into the dark, saying that it's wicked and terrible. The boy is old enough to comprehend her fear, but still he likes it better than the walking.

The darkness feels safe. Saf_er_. And it's something he can do that the others can't. As his siblings have told him, many, many times, he is _not_ them: so, as far as he cares, they can do as they like. He wraps their disdain around his shoulders like the cloak and learns to carve the world out of it.

He doesn't like his family. But, he loves them all the same, because they are familiar and they are all the life he has. He is too young now to get food for himself, so he eats only what the others agree to give him, even if it means having to beg. He laughs and he cries and he plays and he watches television and he eats cereal and he's a child.

He doesn't know what the world is capable of. It's his life.

He doesn't know it's all about to go horribly wrong.

* * *

When he's a little bigger, his oldest sister smiles one day and hands the boy a paper cup, telling him to drink the liquid inside. She is rail-thin, seven years older than him, and her filthy skirt hangs off her waist like tissue. She has never been nice to anyone, but the boy isn't old enough yet to understand the underlying threat in an enemy's kindness.

He lifts the cup to his lips without hesitation and swallows the lye.


	3. three

He's in the hospital for a long time after that, long enough to celebrate his seventh birthday in the ward. There are surgeries and social workers and specialists, and it's not an especially happy time for him, looking back. When the searing pain in his body finally, finally begins to fade, the boy discovers the hospital is a thoroughly boring place. It's too loud, and uncomfortably bright at all hours of the day. Reluctantly he waits for the ordeal to end.

The doctors repair what they can of his burnt insides; his raw tongue, the tissues of his mouth, throat, and stomach. The poison didn't kill him, but it did come close. The doctors tell the boy he'll never speak another word in his life, that it's nothing short of a miracle he can still eat in his condition, can still breathe.

It's the nurses that he really hates, however. They are all too bright and cheery for his comfort, too _nice_. He picks anxiously at the food they give him, terrified of being poisoned again. The last person who acted so nice to him was his sister, and she gave him the lye, so naturally he's a little suspicious of such behavior after that. It's an unpleasant association, one he'll carry with him for the rest of his life.

The boy will never seek out the kindness of strangers. He will never accept compassion from anyone else. What friendships he does form in this state will be deadly, delicate things.

And he will cherish them.

* * *

Life at the hospital grows more disagreeable by the day. The boy sleeps poorly and feels overexposed, wrapping himself tightly in his cloak to ward away nightmares. The nurses don't take the garment away from him; though they did try, once—the boy screamed at them with raw broken half-noises and thrashed like an animal, clawing in a rage at their arms and faces and whatever skin he could reach. The tantrum jeopardized the healing in his throat and they never tried again, letting the swallowed blood and soreness act as punishment enough. The nurses act different toward him and not so nice after that, which the boy appreciates. If acting like a wicked child gets him what he wants, then so be it. He files this information away to use later, when he's old enough to really understand it. Then he sleeps.

He doesn't see his mother in the hospital, or his siblings. Someone may have told him what became of them at some point, but at the time, he had more important things (survival) to worry about. The social workers keep hinting that he'll be given to a new, unknown family when he leaves the hospital, which bothers him. It's not that the boy misses his own family, though he does, a little, but he doesn't _want_ any more siblings or a new mother. If it's going to come to that, he'd really rather just not have a family at all.

A sentiment like that is very hard to explain, especially without any words. The boy doesn't try.

Instead he decides on a different plan.

* * *

One dreary morning, when he finally feels well enough to leave, the boy smiles brightly at the nurse who comes in to bring him a tray of dessert. Then he fans out his cloak dramatically and disappears, vanishing into a vortex of shadows in thin air. He laughs silently to himself at the expression on her face, the utter bewilderment and ever-so-slight trace of fear.

He didn't have to wait for an audience, of course. But it's more fun that way. The boy is still a child, still enjoys making mischief for its own sake.

His fun won't be innocent for long. Already, he's grown to like the gleam of betrayal and comprehension in people's eyes—the look he sees on those who realize, far too late, that he's been playing them all for fools.

And does he ever love to play.


End file.
